South Carolina, North Carolina and other states where Republican and tea party activists have tried to find (or concoct?) evidence of voter fraud have shown that the voter rolls are clean and there has been no "fraud."
And now -- guess what! -- a clear case of voting fraud has surfaced in Florida, among other states. The political party behind the destruction of voter registrations? The Republican party. One eerie site of the current fraud? Palm Beach county, where in 2000 Republican toughs banged on doors and tried to stop the Bush/Gore recount. Now the hired fraudsters are found to have been working for Romney.
The Palm Beach Post report last night that a Florida Republican Party contractor turned in at least 106 “questionable” registration firms, with “similar signatures” and wrong addresses, doesn’t seem like a national news story. But it has unwoven a somewhat concealed effort by Republicans in several states to deploy a firm with an ugly history of allegedly destroying Democratic voter registration forms and other acts of fraud.
The contractor in Florida is called Strategic Allied Consulting, a business entity created a few months ago and registered online by a former Arizona Republican Party director named Nathan Sproul.
Sproul, a consultant based in Tempe, is infamous for accusations that his firms have committed fraud by tampering with Democratic voter registration forms and suppressing votes. Sproul was hired by the Romney campaign for a period of five months that began last November and ended in March. But now there’s evidence that the payments continued, only to a different name. ...The Nation
Sproul been hard at work in Nevada, too, and North Carolina. Apparently* they've been active Republican vote tamperers for years.
John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, and others tried over the years to investigate this company but Bush's Department of Justice stonewalled. In 2006, the Sproul family were invited to the White House at Christmas. They're very, um, loyal Republicans.
Working through state parties, the RNC has sent more than $3.1 million this year to Strategic Allied Consulting, a company formed in June by Nathan Sproul, an Arizona political consultant. Sproul has operated other firms that have been accused in the past of improprieties designed to help Republican candidates, including dumping registration forms filled out by Democrats. None of those allegations have led to criminal charges.
Strategic Allied Consulting was hired to do voter registration drives in Florida, Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina and Nevada, and had been planning get-out-the-vote drives in Ohio and Wisconsin, according to Sproul. Lincoln Strategy Group, another Sproul company, was paid about $70,000 by Mitt Romney's campaign during the primaries to gather signatures.
In Florida's Palm Beach County, election officials turned over 106 forms to prosecutors after discovering forgeries and other problems. Officials in other counties are now reviewing voter registration forms turned in by the state GOP.
Sproul said he created Strategic Allied Consulting at the RNC's request because the party wanted to avoid being publicly linked to the past allegations. The firm was set up at a Virginia address, and Sproul does not show up on the corporate paperwork. ...LA Times
It's a good thing evidence of persistent Republican efforts to skew the vote is finally coming out. But -- have you noticed? -- no one seems particularly surprised.
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*Apparently as distinct from the earlier "in fact." Why? We'll just have to wait and see how far back they've been active in voting fraud activities.
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Lincoln Strategy Group, mentioned above has a bit of a history when it comes to preventing Certain People from voting. Think Progress did some digging about three years ago. Among their findings:
- In Oregon and Nevada, Lincoln Strategies — then known as Sproul and Associates — was investigated for destroying Democratic voter registration forms. The Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential campaign paid Sproul $7.4 million for campaign work. [CNN, 10/14/04; KGW News, 10/13/04; East Valley Tribune, 09/07/06]
- In Nevada, people who registered as Democrats with Lincoln Strategies — then known as Sproul and Associates — found their names absent from the voter registration rolls. [Reno Gazette-Journal, 10/29/04]
- During the 2006 midterm elections, Wal-Mart banned Lincoln Strategies for partisan voter registration efforts in Tennessee. The Republican National Committee had hired the firm. [Associated Press, 08/24/06]
- In Arizona, Lincoln Strategies employed a variety of deceptive tactics — including systematically lying about the bill — to push a ballot initiative to eviscerate the state’s clean elections law. [Salon, 10/21/04]
- Lincoln Strategies, then employed by the Republican Party, was behind efforts to place Ralph Nader on the ballot in states such as Arizona. [American Prospect, 06/25/04] ...ThinkProgress
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Nathan Sproul, the man behind the strategies at Lincoln Strategies, has been on the radar for a while. Here's a piece on him at Daily Kos, going back to 2004.
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